


A Theory to Explain Everything

by prewars



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 03:36:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7250386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prewars/pseuds/prewars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony was one of the top searched results on the majority of the sites Maya visited.</p>
<p>"VICE PRES. INVOLVED IN VIRAL TERRORIST HOLIDAY ATTACKS, TAKEN IN TO CUSTODY." "LIVE STREAM: EMERGENCY CONGRESSIONAL PRESS CONFERENCE CALLED IN D.C." "‘IRON MAN SAVED OUR LIVES’; AIR FORCE ONE CAPTAIN SPEAKS ON FORMER STARK CEO’S INVOLVEMENT." "TONY STARK CALLS FOR TOTAL TRANSPARENCY REGARDING A.I.M. ORGANIZATION’S RESPONSIBILITY IN NATIONAL BOMBINGS."</p>
<p>It had been thirty one hours since Maya Hansen died, and it took three articles to find her name shuffled in at the end, listed as a casualty in the gunfire and a credit to her profession - both false.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Theory to Explain Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I started this nearly a year ago and shelved it until a week ago, and I won't shut up about it to anyone who'll listen, so thank you to Alex who listened to me and didn't tell me to shut the fuck up, and to Zieta who ignored me while I shouted at her, and Kayla who has about as much hate in her heart for Tony Stark as I do.
> 
> Otherwise known as: Maya Hansen becomes Iron Man, part one.

Not here.  
There is not enough  
warmth in this place.

I want  
my heart back  
I want to feel everything again –

That’s what  
the sun meant: it meant  
scorched –

I want she said a theory that explains  
everything

Then:

I want it  
to be my fault  
she said  
so I can fix it –

Blue Rotunda, Louise Gluck

 

 

 

It burned.

The most amazing thing to Maya, as she died on the floor of her hasty lab in Miami, was how accurate and simultaneously inaccurate her test subjects' descriptions of the fire in them was. She heard a description like "boiling my blood from the inside" and she couldn't really comprehend it, because the sentence didn't logically make sense, but then she felt it and she thought, _oh_. It started in Maya's throat, blistering and scorching and like someone was pressing up, as if her skin was the inside of a drum someone wanted to bust open.

She wanted water. She wanted to die.

Once, when Maya was six, she leaned up as her mother was cooking dinner and put her hand too close to a burner that had just been turned on. She didn't scream, too slow in snatching back her hand, but it was a short shocked gasp that came out, and she watched the skin bubble like melting cheese - curious, even then, in a morbid way that led her to sprinkle salt on slugs in summer and hover until the moisture in their body had dried, or to peel at the skin next to her nail bed until it bled and then to press, hard, against her finger until blood would drip out and she could look at it. It felt like that, like her whole body being pressed to a burner, and it didn't stop.

She didn't die. She wished she would, but she didn't, tear ducts too dry to squeeze out tears after long enough until she dragged herself up using her lab stool. A hand held out in front of her, Maya saw the fading glow of heat under her veins, the same effect as holding a flashlight against your fingertips to see through flesh. She followed the light along her forearm and up to her shoulder, felt the heat pool against her heart. After a second, she looked down to where she'd fallen and saw a glistening piece of soft brass on the floor as smooth as undisturbed water, flat as a coin - the bullet. She picked it up and held it against her palm so tightly the cooled edges cut in to her skin, and then opened her hand to watch it heal just as quickly. Then she slipped the melted bullet in to her jacket pocket.

The armed guards Maya had become so used to in everyday life had vanished. There were broken Christmas bulbs, shell casings, and blood everywhere, but Tony, Killian, and Killian's hired guns were gone. It took everything in Maya's body not to run. She had no sense of how long she lay on the floor of her lab, trying to inch away from her own blood pooling around her, but it had to have been at least a few hours; it was dark, the humidity of the day and the new heat in her skin from Extremis made her want to shed her jacket and dress and fling herself in to the ocean, but she pulled her collar higher and zipped up the front of her jacket so the blood stains were less visible as she took the stairs to the gated entrance with her back against the brush, and slipped on to the street. She stood for a moment, breathing deeply and waiting for the regular rush of traffic before she remembered it was Christmas Eve. That was good. Less witnesses to see her escape, to tell police they saw a woman leaving hours after the gunfire and commotion.

Maya walked, and walked, and walked, an hour on foot along the empty streets until she got to the condo she'd been set up in but rarely slept at. (Halfway there, she peeled the back off her phone and tossed the sim card to the side of an alley, and reassembled it, standing against the front of a Starbucks for a wifi connection to check the news sites. After a few headlines, she squeezed her eyes shut and threw her phone so hard against the pavement that it shattered.) Killian had insisted she have a view of the sea at sunrise. That she had earned it, and much more. She wanted to crawl out of her skin at the thought, but rolled her shoulders back and ran a hand through her hair, steeling herself. Breakdown later, escape now.

She walked a bit further down the road until she found a low chain link fence she could jump to get to the beach, and circled back to her condo, pulling the hood of her jacket up so it hid her face. It wouldn't do much, especially if Tony decided he wanted to hack her security footage, or worse, but it made her feel better about pulling down her sleeve so it covered her hand and smashing in the glass of the screen door. The alarm went off as Maya stepped in quickly, kicking the rest of the glass out of the way, and punched in the system code. That gave her at least two minutes before they called a now dissembled phone, and probably ten minutes before anyone was dispatched.

Without turning on any lights to draw attention to herself, Maya moved quickly. First, her hard drives. She picked them up, one by one from around the living room and tossed them in to her waste basket from the bathroom, striking a match from a kitchen drawer and dropping it in. Anything not on her laptop or backed up to Stark Industries had to be lost. After she watched for a moment to make sure it burned properly, she turned away and dropped to the floor beside her bed, yanking out a suitcase and throwing things inside without debate. Sentimental belongings she had to leave behind, set the stage that she'd been living here and intended to return right up to the moment she was shot in the chest. From behind the pipes under the kitchen sink, she grabbed a garbage bag wrapped and taped around a new driver's license, passport, and enough cash that she felt comfortable sleeping at night. Maya hadn't felt comfortable without a built-in escape hatch for years, and she could cry at the relief of being right if she could spare the time, but she couldn't.

Suitcase packed and set by the smashed glass french doors, Maya looked down at the melted and charred hard drives, still burning with the paper under it, before pulling her jacket off and shoving her hand in to the basket to smother the flame. As if her body could sense the burns before they happened, her skin turned the same color as the center of the flame, crackling and shifting until she was the only thing on fire in the waste bin and her hard drives were twisted chunks of plastic.

Maya suppressed a full-body shiver before pulling back, taking the room in three strides and grabbing her bag. For a moment, as she took the stairs to the beach, she wanted to walk straight out in to the ocean and see if Extremis would allow her to drown. For a moment, she wanted to drown.

What stopped her was probably the sirens, or the weight of the salt in the air, or the fire in her now that, against everything, wanted only to live and burn. Not necessarily in that order. She turned back to the line of sand in front of her and walked until she was past her condo, past the fence she had vaulted over before, until the line of condos ended and the road sloped down in to the sand, until she couldn't see the security detail car pull in to her driveway, until she couldn't see the waves that she wanted to walk in to.

She wanted to sit down in the sand and drag mounds of it across her feet like she did when she was young and on vacation with her still-whole family, she wanted to wrap her arms around her knees and wait for S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to drag her up, put her in handcuffs, lock her away for a long time. For her own safety, but mostly for everyone else's.

If Maya had eaten much of anything since the room service Pepper had ordered for her, it would have been on the ground at her feet when she dropped her bag and doubled over, one hand fisted at her stomach and the other covering her eyes, squeezed together. She wanted to claw the nauseous feeling out of her blood, something meaty she could hold responsible for the panic inside, but nothing came out from her dry heaving and the blood on her dress came off, gummy and thick, on her fist. In the dark, standing on the side of the road, Maya tugged and grappled until the zipper tore down her back and she could pull off the dress, suddenly horrified at the sheer amount of blood on it. She was lucky no one had seen her walking or they would have suspected her a murderer, or one's almost-victim. Pulling jeans and a shirt out of her bag, she mused that both options were, technically, true. Maya balled up the dress and tossed it as far as she could away from her and didn't stop to watch it billow out in the wind and fall to the beach, only zipped up her bag and continued walking, scrubbing her fingers against the rough nylon of the strap until they were sore and pink.

Later - only later, now, without her phone, no way of knowing what time it was except that it was still night, and still Christmas eve, and that she had to continue moving while she had the cover of the country being at mass standstill - Maya found an older pickup truck several miles away parked along the curb of a house further back from the road, the white paint slightly rusted in the ocean air, but still working. She dropped her bag behind one of the wheels, slightly, and pulled herself up in to the bed of it, crouched low just in case someone came by. She was counting on the back window being unlatched, the sort of thing one never really paid attention to like a grill cover left open or a bathroom window never locked, only ever closed. With a bit of prying, it slid open, and she took a silent moment to say thank you to no one and nothing in particular, reaching her arm in up to her shoulder and pulling on the lock on the door with the tips of her fingers.

For fun, in college, Tony would dare Maya to hot-wire and bypass the car alarms he modified to the point that they turned it in to a drinking game, one shot for every thirty seconds it took her, so that the drunker she got, the harder it was to focus on the wires in front of her. They usually gave up after two minutes, but Maya got pretty good at hot-wiring and Tony got pretty good at drinking, and it was sort of like riding a bike in that Maya rarely forgot how to do much of anything she did a hundred times. She crept up to the house slowly and left the insurance card from the glove compartment and a thousand dollars wrapped up in yesterday's newspaper under a rock on the porch as a silent apology.

Maya hadn't slept in a full day by the time she hit Orlando. The road was empty save for a person here or there creeping from house to house as the mist cleared and the sky went pink and soft blue. It was beautiful, it was the sort of morning Maya would want to stop on the side of the road and enjoy, call her girlfriend and leave a voicemail because it was so early, about how gorgeous and hazy everything was, how deeply she breathed and felt the morning in her lungs. But she had smashed her phone, and had distanced herself systematically from Jas, and she couldn't stop until she was at least in a different state. Even if that was only for her own peace of mind, because a state line didn't keep her safe - Killian would scour the earth for her, S.H.I.E.L.D. would probably do the same.

She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined the truck drifting in to the other lane, a big rig taking her out and throwing her on the side of the highway like a rag doll. She opened her eyes and tugged the wheel gently back to the right, centered in the lane.

 

 

 

When Maya hit Georgia, it was like taking a hit of an inhaler and feeling a deep breath in her diaphragm, that instantaneous. Sheets of rain that would have been snow if it were cold enough fell across the coastline and Maya pulled in to a gas station in Brunswick to fill up the truck.

She went inside to pay and stood in front of the coffee machine for a minute, staring. It was almost noon and she had driven without tiring, and when she stopped to debate if it was the adrenaline or Extremis she felt vaguely sick. She got a large cup of too hot coffee because she wanted to need it to stay awake, and took a sip to scald her tongue intentionally as she dumped a pile of snacks on the counter. The cashier was wearing a Santa hat and an alarmingly large smile on her face.

"Merry Christmas! How you doin' this morning?" Maya could only hum noncommittally, nodding her head and trying to stretch a smile across her face. It was difficult. "Haven't got a lot of people coming through, are you visitin' family?"

Maya worked her throat (her tongue felt fine, it should be raw and prickly with burns from her coffee but it wasn't) and shrugged. "My sister lives in Canada. Couldn't get away to drive up before today." It was weak, and it would need more work, but it was a good enough lie to keep the woman chatting about dinner plans while ringing up a bag of sunflower seeds.

Putting Maya’s items in a plastic thank you bag, the woman gave her a large grin and said, “You have a good trip, and stay warm out there!” and Maya’s laugh escaped her like a mirthless surprise.

Her sister, Maggie, didn’t live in Canada. Last time Maya had talked to her, she lived in Sacramento, happy, going to school and dating casually and planning weekend trips with friends to Las Vegas, Cabo, Malibu. Maggie was six years Maya’s junior and they weren’t very close - they loved each other, they talked at a regular but not constant pace, but Maya had spent so long alienating everyone that it seemed like she and her sister were strangers, like two people of a similar age who went to the same school and knew each others’ names, partnered together in class, but never quite connected after Maya left for MIT.

At that moment, Maya wanted nothing in the world more than to talk to her. She tugged at the bottom of the steering wheel and guided the pickup back in to the center of the lane.

 

 

 

Maya slept in the cab of the truck once she passed the city limits of Wilmington, North Carolina. The air was drier with an icy bite, half-melted snow on the ground and black ice on the less frequented roads, but Maya had the sleeves of her zip up pulled up to her elbows, the heat turned off. Her teeth didn’t chatter, the tips of her fingers still warm and soft. 

She slept three hours and spent another two staring at the ceiling of the cab and the small slice of isolated sky through the windshield and the top branches of trees that punctured in to view, spindly and delicate and dead. Maya lay on her back and knocked her knees against the seat, back and forth, slowly, unable to stop thinking about Tony Stark leaving her on the concrete floor of her makeshift lab in Miami, how he didn’t even taking the ten steps to check her pulse or breathing, to see her eyes fluttering open and closed. That Killian assumed she was dead - that she was lucky he did, or else she wouldn’t have been able to drag herself to the centrifuge and grapple for a test tube. Unable to stop seeing Pepper’s tears evaporating before they had a chance to touch her heated cheek, and then what an interesting feeling it was to experience it herself, the sizzle of salted steam. The pain of being shot, and then feeling it again in reverse when Extremis expelled the bullet, molten and pure, from her breast. Maya shivered and ran her fingernails over her collarbone and to the neckline of her t-shirt, pushing it down.

 

Killian shot her less than twenty four hours before, but there was no scar, no mark, no redness other than the irritated drag of her nail pressing harder and deeper as if it could scratch some phantom itch.

Abruptly, Maya sat up and grasped around in her bag for the spare key she found in the glove box, attached to a cheap 2D metal novelty flamingo keychain, and two crumpled twenties, and lept out of the truck, slapping the lock down and striding across the parking lot of empty storefronts to the Waffle House across the road. There were several big rigs parked parallel to each other and two drivers hunched over at opposite ends of the counter inside, nursing syrup soaked pancakes and fresh coffee, and Maya slid in to the booth at the very end of the diner car styled restaurant, back against the jukebox with a clear line of sight multiple ways.

The waitress, Emily, who served her was nice and made easy and meaningless small talk, brought extra bacon on the side, even held a hand out to help Maya right herself when Maya stumbled and smoothly slipped the phone out of her front apron pocket.

 

Maya smiled, fluttering her hands about and pushing her hair behind her ear and thanking Emily profusely, and dropped the rest of the cash she had leftover from the bill on the table as a tip once the waitress had turned her back.

Back in the pickup with defrost turned on high, Maya reset the phone to get rid of the unlock code and brought up the browser. Tony was one of the top searched results on the majority of the sites Maya visited.

VICE PRES. INVOLVED IN VIRAL TERRORIST HOLIDAY ATTACKS, TAKEN IN TO CUSTODY

LIVE STREAM: EMERGENCY CONGRESSIONAL PRESS CONFERENCE CALLED IN DC

‘IRON MAN SAVED OUR LIVES’; AIR FORCE ONE CAPTAIN SPEAKS ON FORMER STARK CEO’S INVOLVEMENT

TONY STARK CALLS FOR TOTAL TRANSPARENCY REGARDING A.I.M. ORGANIZATION’S RESPONSIBILITY IN NATIONAL BOMBINGS

It had been thirty one hours since Maya Hansen died, and it took three articles to find her name shuffled in at the end, listed as a casualty in the gunfire and a credit to her profession - both false.

From Wilmington to Alexandria, Maya only stopped with buds in her ears so the cashiers at the smaller mom-and-pop convenient stores less likely to have better surveillance cameras wouldn’t be inclined to chat with her. 

 

She gulped down hot coffee, gave them all tight smiles, and dragged her teeth over her unscathed tongue moments later, all the way up to Alexandria.

As both traffic and interstate signs for D.C. increased in frequency, Maya pulled the truck off to a shoulder under a bridge, rock salt still scattered along the edges of the melted ice on the asphalt. She could see the city without squinting and when she reached down, a clump of snow all but disappeared in her palm faster than when she was a child pulling her warm fingers out of mittens. Maybe she could stop in the city, walk up to the officer in the middle of a crosswalk and give them the biggest arrest of their career. Give them a great Christmas gift - evil scientist in league with one of the largest modern day terrorist organizations. Walk across the bridge to the Triskelion and bang on the gated iron doors until they let her in so she could confess. She could make it to New York before the sun set without breaking any speed limits, walk straight in to the lobby of Tony Stark’s latest conquest in the skyline, and surrender. Ask for Pepper Potts’ undeserved forgiveness.

Articles about her death had started to slowly trickle in, but at a greater volume were reports of Killian Aldrich’s own, and his involvement with the terrorism bombings in Los Angeles and Miami that Tony kept reiterating to anyone who would listen.

Maya took her first deep breath in days, the tendrils of stress loosening from her muscles, and fell asleep at a motel in Alexandria with the Triskelion visible in the distance across the Potomac. As a backup plan. She didn’t sleep long, dreamed of guilt and blame and the people who died in her experiments watching her through the windows of a house. She thought it was her house, because it felt like home, comfortable, but every time she stepped forward the floor wobbled and boards of wood snapped under her feet and she was always facing a window with blazing eyes watching her. She woke up to sweat on her upper lip and her stomach trying to crawl up her throat, uncomfortably warm under thin sheets and a long t-shirt. On her way scrambling out of bed, she looked over to check the temperature on the air conditioner; 55 degrees.

After she puked, Maya pulled the shades tighter and layed back down, facing the empty wall. She dozed light and jumpy, until the sun rose so bold and strong that it penetrated the thick wool hotel curtains and fell across her shoulders.

Maya showered, her first since washing off hastily with a bottle of water in Orlando. Blood flaked off her scalp, unnoticed with her thick dark hair, left the soap shaded a rust brown. It made her gag again but she choked it back, tilting her face upward in to the stream of water, and she let loose several tears, lost to the beat of city water, before she bit down on the inside of her cheek. She felt human for the first time in days, and immediately hated herself for it, because she didn’t deserve it. She shouldn’t have even gotten a motel room, shouldn’t have stopped, should have kept driving until...until she couldn’t go any further. Until she hit Maine, or a lake, or the ocean, and stopped at the shore. It didn’t matter which shore. It didn’t matter where she walked out in to the waves. It wouldn’t kill her. She wouldn’t drown.

Dripping wet and holding a towel against her with one hand and scissors from the toolbox in the stolen red pickup truck in the other, Maya hacked at the edges of her hair until there was more on the floor than her head, wet clumps of curls that were easier to sweep up with the side of her hand. It didn’t make looking in the mirror any easier but at least she wouldn’t be quite as recognizable.

Maya positioned her laptop on the small desk in the corner with her back to the wall, and pulled up her A.I.M. files, every single thought she’d ever had related to Extremis expanded and outlined and detailed. Fourteen years, a folder for every one. The one thing she came back to, as if her research were a lover, could do more for her than the warmth of sharing her life with someone else all that time. Stacked up, now against her death, terabytes of files and formulas and footage seemed so small. Seemed almost not worth it.

With an angry swipe of her fingers, Maya trashed videos of initial experimentation, round after round of Extremis dosage, explosions. Killian with his own folder devoted to his recovery; medical files, check ups, details of round one, two, three. Videos of him walking without his forearm crutches, then without a cane, proud (arrogant). In the clips, Maya can see herself off to the side in every one of them, arms crossed protectively over her body, face almost sullen, although, even now, she would have sworn she had felt elated at her own success. Would have sworn she cheered with Aldrich, saw the future laid out before her, modern medicine revolutionized. Eyes too big for her stomach. She traced everything she’d sent to Stark Industries and scanned the files for any changes from a new admin, anything that might jump out. By now, she knew Tony’s formulation by heart, worn and dirty and written on the back of his ID tag from 1999. She almost left it on the bedside table with his sunglasses and a torn piece of a Toblerone wrapper with his phone number scribbled on it. Now she thought she probably should have.

Maya sat for a while, hands poised over the keyboard, before bolting up and out of the room, leaving her laptop sitting on the table, cursor blinking at the beginning of a new file named “Ext_experiment_subject 0274_Hansen_Maya.” She couldn’t resist the addictive urge to understand, to know why she survived when her experiments (subjects, victims, soldiers) didn’t. It resurrected that churning, twisting feeling in her gut as she slammed the truck door with more force than necessary and put it in reverse. She needed something else, a new way around, the truck was sure to be reported missing by now but she didn’t know if the likelihood of being searched for so far away outweighed the risk of trying to lift another car in DC.

She sat on a park bench with half a sandwich in a plastic container, as if it would help the nausea knotted up in her stomach, and when it didn’t she continued to eat anyway, hoping maybe it would give her something to throw up instead of dry heaving.

The door to her room was open when she returned, her finger looped through the keychain of the truck even though she had abandoned it seventeen miles away at Benning Park and walked back. It wasn’t a small crack, as if someone were hiding or trying to ambush her. They wanted her to know they were there.

When she stepped inside, arm stretched out to push the door slowly, Tony uncrossed and crossed his leg, sitting behind her laptop, and cleared his throat, fingers drumming mindlessly against the particleboard desktop.

“Dr. Hansen, great to see you again. S’been a while.” The corner of his mouth sneered, as if he couldn’t help it, and Maya instinctively wanted to hit him.

“I would ask how you found me, but...” Maya gestured to her laptop, screen tilted back as if it had been read by someone standing - probably before they sat down to wait for her. She stepped back until her knees hit the bed and sat down, dropping the plastic bag in her hand. An orange rolled out and hit the side of her foot gently.

“Yeah, you’re slipping, doc. A government investigation in to Killian’s little...think-tank, and you didn’t think we’d be monitoring everything? Your email address sets off more alarms than an Alabama Wal-mart.”

“And if I let you catch me?”

“Your fields are botany and bio-technology, not computer science, Mitnick. You didn’t _let_ me do anything.” After a second he leaned forward, sitting straight now, and Maya had to fight the instinct to lean back to maintain the distance between their bodies. “I like the new ‘do. Should’ve dyed it, pull a real Gone Girl on me.”

“Not everything is about you.”

“No, no, you’re right, you’re just running _from_ me. And S.H.I.E.L.D. But mostly me.”

“Yes, you’re the end-all, be-all, Tony Stark.” Maya barely maintained a grip on her snarl, on her repressed anger from the past week. Her knuckles were white, small cracking and popping noises from her joints muffled against her thighs. “This isn’t about you, it’s about surviving. My death isn’t about you.”

Tony looked at her, then. Really looked at her. She wanted to squirm, to move, to look away like she had so many times before but she sat up, blinked slower. Looked back.

“It wasn’t all my fault.”

“Yeah, I didn’t fucking say it was. You didn’t look back, though. You didn’t come back.”

Tony was the one to look away, now. He flinched, and it felt good.

“I did what I did because not everyone has the good fortune to’ve been born a Stark. To have what they need, what they want.”

“You could have come to me, I would’ve - “

“Fucked me and left me in a hotel room? You knew about my research. You knew I needed funding. What would you have done differently? I don’t have time or energy to be your regret porn, Tony. I wanted to get out. Set up my own medical technology clinical trials.”

“Who would’ve been the kindling for that fire?”

Maya stood, fists at her side, nostrils flaring, and felt rather than saw her veins light up, one quick pulse of red-orange from the center of her body. Tony knocked his foot sideways and there was a metallic thump against the floor - the suit, compressed in to a gaudy red and silver suitcase, ready for Tony’s handprint to activate. She deflated immediately, collapsing back to sit on to the edge of the bed, and Tony stomped down with the edge of his sneaker to set the suit upright again.

“You’re not better than me. I made a mistake, giving a damn enough to warn you, but you’re not better than me. I could have done it, I was going to do better on my own. I didn’t have to die in a cave to come to that conclusion first.”

“It’s about morality, Maya. Right, and wrong, and you know it was wrong. Human experimentation - wrong.”

“Does it make it better that you didn’t see your victims? That you didn’t get to know them, that you didn’t shake their hands or promise them - promise them anything, _everything_ , promise their lives back before you killed them? My victims signed waivers, yours couldn’t escape the missile range.” It choked Maya, the heat and the rage, the need to let it out like compressed air pressure before she exploded, but she knew what happened when she let it out. Rose Hill, Tennessee. Cards and funeral wreaths and single flowers with long stems. She takes a deep breath until it hurts in her stomach, and exhales.

“I have to take you in, Maya.”

“You don’t have to do anything. You once told Congress to kiss your ass on CSPAN. You _want_ to arrest me.”

Tony sneered, again, the muscle movement so familiar, and tilted his head. “Call it a bit of both, then.”

Maya stood up after a minute, picked up the abandoned orange, and crossed the short space between her bed and the desk Tony sat at. She closed the lid of her laptop with a sharp snap.

“Like I said. What if I let you find me.”


End file.
